Winter trains part 2

Our train that was set to depart at 6:25 had not physically reached the station until 6:45. The people turning and sheepishly working back through the Lowell deluge after the official boarding announcement were Newburyport commuters with a scheduled theoretical departure of 6:45. What cheek to think they would leave the station within 10 minutes of on-schedule. Their delay was heard fading as I shuffled the platform with the horde, and it gave me a vague sense of justice served. The perverse mind of the frozen delayed commuter; his misery is actively seeking company, and he condemns those who aren't foundering with him yet.

Ask me no questions

Q. Why did it take the French pastry chef so long to get to work?

A. He had to 'croissant' a busy street.

If you don't like my joke, say it to my face. Don't go behind my back and trash me on message boards. You know I hate that. And make sure you keep a straight face the entire time if you tell the joke. That's how it's done, with two apostrophes.

Parentheses

I have literally been busy lately. Not like everyone who always says 'I've been busy', no, I have actually been rather busy. It is an unaccustomed feeling, like scoring a goal, or writing a timely and relevant blog post. I haven't even had time to see what all my mates are up to on Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm, the blogosphere; the whole social media universe! Will the cogs of these virtual worlds continue to grind on without my presence and peripheral insight? Only time can tell!

stacks

* Being in the library to work on a musicology paper that I had no hope of comprehending in my numbed, utterly distracted state. This was me. I'm still that person.

*The grimy desks are the same, the aged volumes institutionally bound are the same, the powerful musty smell of books has not changed. Why should it have?

*I remembered that I had loved this place powerfully as a sanctuary, a place to play at being an academic and reading and writing for long hours till the bubble of restlessness burst.

*It always feels good, still, to pick out a volume or two, take them home for free. They might never be read, but say, what if one day I take a sudden, strong interest in John Donne? I must equip myself ahead of that day that we await with faithful anticipation.

No Good With Secrets

Tonight he was the master of salmon. Whirling in the small but uncramped kitchen, pasta was boiled, and fish sauteed a little too long, but with a gentle intent. Lovingly the onions went over low heat with sherry and capers, just enough care given to keep them from burning before the liquid arrived. Crackling skin gave up billows of smoke from the cast iron, but no harm was done. The sweet tangy sauce played against the bedrock fish, lapping at the edges, eroding a little, but not having its way fully.

Out of context, floating free in time and space

I have a feeling that F. Scott Fitzgerald had the opposite problem. He had too many people that believed in him. There's a quote on the back of my book that even says “You are a great writer. Believe it, not me.” I'm getting the feeling throughout this book that Scottie [that's what his intimates call him] was given to believe that he was a great writer a little too much [this is another problem, his abuse of italics in the text]. He has too much confidence in himself as a man of letters. He believes too much in his own powers of description. He is also clearly pretty snobby about being an American expatriate in Paris, and is eager to show how much he knows about this lifestyle, much the same as Hemingway.

I guess this new fare hike means that I'll ride my bike

Aspirational Marketing

Goal:

blue leather,

back of a

chauffeured town car

to the salon

Christophe does your bangs

for a [who's counting] grand

or two

Here:

blue leather,

back of a

commuter train seat dilapidated

Girls on their way

to nothing jobs

try to dress the part

doing hair in vaguely oily

mirrored window sheen

Sketch 1

W- The face of the popular girl from high school, thirty years on. The eyes still have the girlish twinkle. There are some lines around them, but not many. Even in her late forties, she still has kept some of that spark about her. She wears skirts short enough to draw the eye and introduce a vague question involving dress codes and seemliness, one that fades. She tends to say 'blahblahblah' to quickly gloss over something that doesn't need to be pounded out in detail.

Her whole aspect is a double entendre, and begs another question of how to interpret her. Is she the attractive older woman who has held her power to turn people's heads? Or is she rather the desperate fortysomething who has, frighteningly, never changed? [Would I be considered an anti-feminist boor in some circles for the manner in which I pose these questions?—A separate question entirely, you will agree.]

[bracketed digressive interspersals doing anything for you?]

I saw a shock of gray emerging at her hairline yesterday and was struck by how well the dye had done its duty: I never once considered how old she must be. It was all I could do not to stare at it after that. Does she know that I have guessed at her secret? [A hint here at the secrets we all keep in plain sight and we think people don't notice. They must have, though, no?]

These questions I'm inclined to pose about her make her one of the only people in the department who is truly interesting on her own merits. What happened to her? How did some part of her become arrested in a stage of growth, before it was fully mature [I am presuming, but what is life without presumption?]? I can only hope that it is not one of the darker mysteries that is hinted at by the evidence. Assumption: she married young to a high-school sweetheart, felt trapped, but stayed in it, and acts out in barely perceptible ways to assert her lost freedom. And who says you can't judge your elders and postulate their life stories based on appearances and surface perceptions?

event horizon

I could only hope to not be this good at worrying for the rest of my life.

"We have changed plans."

This strikes the ear funny, if you let it. Maybe we haven't changed our own plans, but inadvertently changed the plans of others by our unwitting actions. The words don't discriminate. Plans have been changed, though, by us. We have changed plans. Keep repeating it, it sounds absurd if you keep at it. We have changed plans. It could also be that we are now in possession of changed plans, as in We have changed plans. We've come to be in charge of them, who knows how. You hadn't considered these notions, had you?

"...so flowers, except in the common-noun sense (he knew birds liked them, as did bees), sent no message to Keith's blue eyes." -- Martin Amis

How clever

I put all my books in a box

if i could digress for a moment, and i will, how can you make a biopic about someone who's 26 years old, the facebook guy? he hasn't really lived long enough for us to judge whether his life has had meaning. plus, isn't it still entirely possible that facebook could end up being something of a fad, along the lines of say...myspace? i'm just saying, it's not like he's gandhi, he's a smarmy, opportunistic 26 year-old who happened to have a good idea. why the need to lionize him and analyze his life so much? perhaps i'm jealous because i'm 24 and i haven't invented facebook yet. nope, that's not it. i'm jealous that john updike got a story published in the new yorker when he was 22, but i wouldn't want to be this facebook guy.

[does anybody read these things?]

-allan

That you weren't wrong

So if life is so hard, what makes it worth the while? It's the people, it must be. These people everywhere, I love them, they're imperfect and so worthy all the same, or because of it.

And how I missed her but then she would say these magic things that floated in and out and in my head. They were little things but that nothing was precious, it's trivial, but together these things accrete into everything that you have together, really a huge collection of tiny things. That's how I came to think of it, anyways.

I found it so funny that I could hang with them even on subjects that I didn't care about, or TV shows I hadn't watched in years. Could I help but interpret this as evidence of some kind of social intelligence now in my possession? It didn't used to be like this, high school was a long time that I don't remember three quarters of.

I was reading a Bret Easton Ellis novel, which I didn't understand at all. It was about people whose lives have become completely empty, and the flashes of human emotion that seep through into their days at the cracks. The emotions, when they're present, don't seem natural at all because the default state is a void. His next book was better by far, even considering the dark themes and the parts about people living empty lives, it felt warm and supple by comparison with the icy, nihilistic rigor of the first novel. Poor Bret, I'd have to say. It must be awful to even be able to write emptiness so realistically. I'd much rather not be able to write well about empty people. It might rub off if you're not careful.

Ecola

This place is my birthright. If you could understand what it means to me . . .

Windwhistle sentences, Part Two

*I had trimmed my beard in preparation for receiving visitors.

*His observed indifference to photography seemed callous at first.

*Michael wondered if they had yet marked the sound of his felt-tipped pen rasping against the page.

*It was unfair, now that she mentioned it, for him to have expected that the profession would be received in any other manner.

*The autumn was coming soon, the sweater season, and with it innumerable chilly days until the spring anniversary.

*He fingered his joints in mournful anticipation of the arthritis that was to come decades hence.

*The clips on the line continued to rap their senseless cadence against the flagpole long after the families had departed.

You set my soul alight

-Moving in is like a burglary in reverse.

Clever, utterly devoid of meaning, or both? You be the judge.

/\<>/\

It feels good to be with your family. It's right.

It feels right to be good. It is good to be right. My friends across the aisle will agree it's good to be on the right when the shoe is on the other foot.

Doing the right thing isn't always easy, but it must be always right.

Do you see now how the squire tied himself in a knot?

The word love gets thrown around a lot at graduation.

Have high standards and they must be met, must.